Stanley Fish Quotes

Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors.

It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.

No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.

The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'

I do not support abortion rights. Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me.

The purpose of a good education is to show you that there are three sides to a two-sided story.

We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.

Before the words slide into their slots, they are just discrete items, pointing everywhere and nowhere.

Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.

The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them,..

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

...words so precisely placed that in combination with other words, also precisely placed, they carve out a shape in space and time.

The category of first sentence makes sense only if it is looking forward to the development of thematic concerns it perhaps only dimly foreshadows.

This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.

Verbal fluency is the product of hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is hte product of hours spent repeating scales." p. 26

Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?